Moonbox

Which has always been the easiest and most brilliant scam of the political right. Did Trump help working-class Americans? Nope. Did he help big business? For sure.

The best part is that he's been making all of these crypto-bro noises amidst a general collapse in cryptocurrencies everywhere. Yes! A great alternative to bogeyman central banking "manipulation" are worthless electronic tokens propped up by nothing but ponzi and greed! If you don't like $CAD inflation, get a load of Bitcoins 1-year devaluation! It's too stupid to fathom.

Pierre Polievre "gets away" with saying all sorts of stupid shit too. All of his talk about central banks and bitcoin etc are complete nonsense and he's smart and educated enough to know that. He's just making the noises the rabble want to hear and he got elected party leader because of the dumb stuff he says, rather than anything smart. Now that he controls the party, he can maybe start talking like a real leader with real ideas rather than screeching his base's talking points back to them.

Trudeau's been criticized heavily, both in the media and just generally, for his bromidic platitudes and vapid "sunny day" answers. Every time he opens his mouth I can pretty much pre-empt what he's going to say by stringing together words like, "As Canadians, we have to be look forward to the future and we can be proud of how Canadian we are in our hope for Canada and something something Unity blah blah blah."

There are two sides to that argument. If you're going to blame Trudeau for inflation (which has little/nothing to do with him), you should also give him credit for how well we've fared compared to most of the rest of the world (whose inflation is worse). Of course he deserves credit for neither, but let's not cherry-pick to suit our political viewpoints. Fact is that inflation is a global phenomenon and thus blaming it on Trudeau is foolish to start. An ounce of objective reasoning should show you that. Similarly, Canada's (relative) better position on inflation is due entirely to the War in Ukraine and commodity prices keeping our dollar strong, which counteracts the forces of inflation (to an extent). Trudeau had no hand in that either. This is where Trudeau should be criticized. He is grossly overspending and mismanaging our finances, but that's not what's driving inflation. He's just quickly creating a public finances crisis.

@betsy Do you feel CAPITAL LETTERS in RANDOM PLACES with CHANGES in COLOUR make your post more COMPELLING!? It doesn't. It's hard to even tell what point you're trying to make here.

Yeah but whatabooout THAT OTHER THING?

Certainly. We'll see how things go. Nope, but then I don't support Trudeau either. I think the next election is going to come down to who's going to do the most harm. Trudeau will torpedo public finances for a generation just like his father did, and we'll have to wait and see if PP's bullshit during his leadership bid was just to placate the rabid base. Yeah I guess. I didn't really know what the background was for that. I was in university at the time and didn't really understand what the big deal was. Both sides, certainly. It's scary.

It's devolving to tribalism, and we're only a few steps behind the Americans on that. I always have. I've considered myself very fiscally conservative, but not so much on social issues. My voting history has been heavily skewed towards conservatives (60-70 % for Federal and 100% provincially). I just don't identify with the conspiracy circus and their antics turn me away (like they did in the last election). and nobody would go to your town hall meetings to demand someone lose their job if they said something ignorant about women or whatever. They'd just note you as an ignorant ass and move on, and/or talk about you behind your back. Certainly, but politics is too often observing which way the wind is blowing and jumping in front of the crowd to "lead" them where they were already going. It always amazed me that liberals or whatever you want to call them couldn't understand how Trump got elected, when I would argue they were indirectly responsible for getting him there in the first place (or at least someone like him). If you don't govern from the centre and for the centre, and if you continue to refuse any compromise, the backlash will be fierce and swift.

I'm not talking about inflation here. I'm talking about government overspending, which Trudeau is guilty of. He was overspending before the pandemic and he's overspending now. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and accept the COVID stimulus and lockdowns, but the way he's expanding the federal public service is just bad fiscal management - full stop. You're absolutely right that "Justinflation" is a circus act that every opposition around the world is using to attack its standing government, but there is at least a grain of truth to it. Running huge and unnecessary deficits makes the problem worse, not better.

You always have Maxime fren. He'll console you.

I don't really know what the solution is though. Even I grew tired of Harper at the end, and I was a strong supporter for most of his time in office. There was a point when it became clear his pragmatism was actually just cynicism and when he tried to up the TFSA contribution limits to $10,000/year, it was clear he wasn't governing for "working families" anymore. I think that political literacy in Canada has probably never been lower and it's only getting worse. It's all part of a broader culture problem though, tied-in to outrage politics and the battle over wokeism etc. I'm consider myself a mostly social progressive but the culture of "offense" that has taken root everywhere doesn't strike me as pragmatism. The response for "This offends me" should usually be some combination of "So what?" and "Sorry you feel that way". There absolutely is a time and place for outrage and consequences for words, but the West is entirely unique in how much time and energy their politics spend managing people's hurt feelings. This sort of anti-pragmatism has had predictable results as well, motivating and to an extent validating the loudest and angriest against among the "deplorables". Guys like Alex Jones became popular in this environment.

People will just get angrier at Trudeau over time. The Emergency Act will be forgotten, but his sublime mismanagement of the economy and the public server (like his father) will turn enough people against him eventually. The federal Liberals will collapse the same way and for the same reasons as the Ontario Liberals. Eventually people will roll the dice on a guy like PP and will ignore he supported the Freedumb Convoy and all of the other dumb stuff he said because they'd rather a wildcard than a sure-bet loser. I suspect/hope that PP will moderate and drop some of his dumber claims/ideas now that he's won the leadership. We'll see.

I'm not a huge fan of hers in general mainly on account of her channeling the boob vote and the hurr durr fake news crowd, but like Poilievre she's smart and I agree with her on a fair bit of stuff. She actually knows what she's talking about in this video though and she's absolutely right here.

The debt to GDP ratio that has been touted over the years is an accounting trick. Canada Pension Plan's holdings are included on the asset side of that calculation which grossly overstates how good these numbers look. Without that included (which shouldn't be) we don't look any better than the countries Trudeau keeps comparing us to. I've talked about how/why the CPP changes from the 1990's changed how this is all accounted for and how Canada is fairly unique in this regard, but you can read about it here: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/caution-required-when-comparing-canadas-debt-to-that-of-other-countries

No, I understand salary plus benefits pretty well. The folks who don't are union employees complaining about their wages whilst ignoring how valuable their benefit packages are. Yes, and the UAW is a model for dysfunction and the primary reason why North American auto manufacturers have struggled since the late 1990's. When I was in business school back in the early 2000's, we studied GM vs Toyota and GM at the time had a $40/hr labor cost disadvantage vs Toyota. Meanwhile, when jobs became available at any Toyota plant, there'd be 100's of qualified applicants for every single position. That's why GM and Chrysler went bankrupt during the financial meltdown.

A few things: 1) It was already clear that they were reckless spenders, but the scale and the rationale behind it was not. 2) The steady and gradual increase in the spending (rather than, say, an increase to the baseline early on in his government to follow up on election promises or whatever) over 6-7 years clearly demonstrates a breakdown in budgetary constraint and discipline. 3) The structural nature of these deficits is a problem. If it was infrastructure spending on productivity-enhancing projects, I'm generally on board. When a large portion of that spending is instead going towards a growing bureaucracy and entrenched public sector union, you lose me. The federal public service has grown since Trudeau's day by roughly the equivalent of the size of Canada's armed forces (which from what I understand hasn't really grown at all). I am basing my numbers on PBO Kevin Page's report from like 10+ years ago. You would probably agree that this number is unlikely to have improved since then. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-watchdog-finds-average-public-service-job-costs-114k-1.1174021 I don't think anyone here is going to seriously argue that our soldiers are overpaid. The bloat of clerks and pencil pushers, on the other hand, averaging over $110k/year including benefits, is a joke.

Was just reading this article and it sort of scared me a bit. I knew Justin was a spender (still believe his dad was our worst PM ever, at least until him) but the numbers are pretty stark. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-expansion-of-federal-civil-service-lacks-the-proper-measurements-for/ That's a paywall but the gist of it is that the federal public service has grown by an appalling ~25% since 2016 while the population grew around 7%. The average federal servant in Canada already makes over $100,000/year including their benefits and now stands at over a quarter million Canadians. This is not sustainable and we will almost certainly not be getting value out of these additional hires. This is the sort of thing that would make me vote for Pierre Poilievre, despite my strong distaste for the man.

This is true to an extent, but primarily for older Soviet generations. The younger folk have known nothing but supposed democracy and have had a taste of modern and open civilization that the old Russian generations didn't. A Russian's ability to endure shouldn't be underestimated, but that shouldn't be confused with a resilient and diverse economy, which they categorically do not have. China plays both sides. They'll support Russia to the extent they can remain a disruptive force, but not to the point where the Western trading partners they rely on start pulling away from them. Self-deluded dictators have gambled on what they perceived as the softness and decadence of the West. It usually didn't end well for them. The irony and contradiction of most of these anti-democratic forces is that they feel that their freeeedom is being taken away. Whatever foolishness either side gets themselves into, I believe at the core that democratic beliefs are still very strong, despite how ignorant and rabid the far-right and far-left can be.

No I don't think anyone needs to listen to FOX NEWS. Pot meet kettle...again. Your lack of perspective here is hilarious.

and faceplanted majestically. Well done little Vlad. You set your country's economy back to the 1980's. ? With that said, Trump was certainly right here, as he was occasionally with other things as well. I suspect you're not about to tell us about all the times he was wrong though, are you?

No, it was not a good take. He was a misanthropic, and out-of-touch cleric who argued that poor people were like animals and that allowing them to reproduce would doom us all. His theories weren't just categorically wrong (proven false). They were also wrong (shameful). The theory of lebenstraum was based on the same thinking - Hitler argued that increased farming intensity/improved management couldn't keep up with a growing population, thus Germany needed to expand eastward. That's not to say that Malthusianism is bad theory because Hilter believed it. It's bad for the same reason that institutional eugenics are. Going back to our original point, calculating environmental impact costs from an economic sense is very difficult (almost impossible). Aside from explicit cleanup costs or things like that, you are just making wild guesses and basing your numbers on a lot of nebulous assumptions. Sustainable growth is vital for the health of the planet, but the numbers behind it are not always clear. I don't say that as a climate change denier or anything like that, but there are a lot of alarmists who lead us into bad/wasteful decisions because of questionable theory/math/economics (see Dalton McGuinty's Green Energy Plan).

Late reply, but nothing was clear. Not only could James Malthus not calculate what you're referring to, but his economic theories were proto-industrial and have proven demonstrably false. He grossly overestimated population growth, grossly underestimated productivity improvements and humanity's ability to adapt. In short, Malthus' predictions were good for deer but not much else.

Are you joking? Do I even need to answer that? I would take him back in an instant over Trudeau, but let's be real. He was the ultimate pragmatist.

There are economists that try to calculate it, but it's not a very clear science and it ignores the main problem of all the environmental (particularly carbon-based) action plans. Unilateral action without buy-in from your neighbors and competitors is not helpful. Setting aggressive/painful carbon prices for your own industry while importing things from India or China doesn't reduce overall carbon. You are just outsourcing your pollution (along with the associated jobs) to the third-world. If you don't apply carbon-based duties on imports equal to the ones you're imposing on domestic polluters, you're just making yourself poorer for no net benefit. These sorts of policies don't do much other than give downtown yuppies comfy feels and allow goofs like Trudeau to pat themselves on the back.